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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Mastering the Alpha Male

I met Ann Jacobs at my very first Romantic Times Convention back in 2004. Because authors are often seated alphabetically at book signings, we've been next to each other, not only then, but several times since. I'm pleased to welcome Ann today to talk about the wonderful Alpha Male characters we all know and love.

What is it about romance readers that draw them to the Alpha
Male, that commanding, sometimes exasperating guy they’d most likely strangle
if they had to live with him every day?

I believe it’s the fantasy—the secret dream of every woman
to be protected, wrapped in the strong arms of a man who will take on all her
problems and make them go away by the sheer force of his will. On an even
deeper level, it’s the need to escape a modern world full of responsibilities,
decision-making, high pressure demands of bosses and society in general…to
relinquish the iron control she must exert on a daily basis to a man strong
enough to shoulder all those.

A hero to die for—he is hard to buy in a contemporary
setting unless… Unless he’s a desert sheikh to fulfill a modern woman’s harem
fantasy, a larger-than-life figure so dominant he can master even the strongest
woman… Unless he can reach into a reader’s psyche and make her think, “I want
this man to take me—anywhere he chooses to go.” That hero must connect with the
reader on every level: physical, emotional, sexual, but mostly emotional. He
must control the heroine (and thus, the reader) with care, with love, with an
understanding of her needs that transcends her own self-knowledge.

Alpha males—they’re strong men, strong enough to tame
stronger lovers. Sometimes unabashed Alphas are easier to sell to readers when
their stories are set in worlds apart from the contemporary world where we all
live, which I believe is what drives authors whose favorite story worlds are
contemporary to detour into fantasy worlds of their own making.

Move basically contemporary Alpha heroes into a fantasy
world, and an author’s ingrained inhibitions can take a backseat. I did this in
a brave yet often terrifying futuristic world that I created, a world very
loosely based on premises George Orwell put forth in his classic, 1984, in which Earthlings’ personal
freedoms are first eroded and then destroyed.

The result: ten loosely connected novellas based on heroes
who refused to accept strictures placed on their sexual freedom and who built
their own societies in which there were no sexual bounds, no societal taboos to
threaten and emasculate them.

No Bounds, my newest
release from Ellora’s Cave Publishing, is the first, chronologically speaking, in
the novellas. It is the story of the strong Alpha Dominant who follows and
founds a colony off-planet after being banished from Earth—a resort where his
fellow Earthlings may safely pursue their forbidden fantasies. No Bounds and the nine novellas (Note 1)
that follow demonstrate what happens when Mankind’s personal freedoms are
abridged—and how strong men and their even stronger lovers find not only sexual
freedom but also the happily-ever-after endings they could not have achieved back
home.